Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

When Telecom Carriers Become Your Middleman for Contact Center Services

May 09, 2012

When large telecom carriers offer customers business services, they've got some tough competition. The common rule, that a phone company is a phone company is a phone company, is one the major carriers have been fighting for years, usually by trying to differentiate themselves from one another by their add-on services.


In recent years, large carriers such as Verizon and AT&T have decided one way to stand out from other business telecom services to offer call center functionality to customers. With today's hosted contact center platforms, this is very possible. Functions that used to be carried out on “big boxes” in a company's IT room can be delivered via the Internet, including automatic call distributors (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities backed up by speech recognition, call recording and storage functionality, customer relationship management (CRM) and many other needed contact center processes.

By partnering with call center companies, these large carriers can even offer some social media monitoring tools.

So who are these carriers turning to in order to provide contact center functionality? Verizon chose hosted contact center solutions provider inContact and its Virtual Contact Center platform. AT&T has its Hosted Integrated Contact Services, through to a partnership with call center solutions provider Genesys.

Of course until recently, it made sense to offer these types of services only to the largest of business customers. That may be about to change, according to blogger Cindy Whelan, Principal Analyst at Business Network & Wholesale Services.

“Historically, the carriers’ target market for contact center services has been large enterprises,” wrote Whelan. “The beauty of these newer hosted contact center solutions is that unlike premises-based equipment, carriers can scale these offers down to meet the needs of mid-market and smaller enterprises.”

This allows carriers, in cooperation with the contact center platforms, to offer call center capabilities to organizations with only 25 employees. And by rolling call center capabilities into the contract with a telephone carrier, they may even be able to see a price break...and less of a hassle.




Edited by Braden Becker



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